Andrew Boone

The main corridor connecting San Francisco with Silicon Valley is plagued by crowded trains, a congested Highway 101, and ineffective public bus services. "Let's imagine a railroad that has so much capacity and utility that people are using it for all kinds of trips," says SPUR's Transportation Policy Director.

Designers somehow weren’t able to find any space to install bike lanes nearest to Marsh Road, where the street is a massive 80 feet wide. City planners instead hope to lure bicyclists onto the new sidewalks with signs reading “Bicycles OK to Use Sidewalk.”

San Mateo County Transit District's Youth Mobility Plan recommends a number of initiatives to boost the agency’s declining ridership by improving quality of service for youth. “Today’s youth passengers are tomorrow’s adult passengers,” said SamTrans Senior Planner Lindsay Kiner.

The City of San Mateo will double its Bay Bikes bike share fleet to 100 bikes by October.

“The goal here is to make a consistent travel time for carpools and buses,” said San Mateo County Transportation Authority Deputy Project Manager Leo Scott. "If we can do that, we incentivize the movement from single occupancy cars to higher occupancy vehicles.” At the same time, widening the highway to ten lanes does exactly the opposite, creating more space for more single occupancy vehicles - Caltrans is expecting the number of vehicles on Highway 101 to jump between four to seven percent in just the next three years.

Residents insist that safety changes are needed, but that removing parking won't help.

Removing a nasty S-curve and replacing it with a grid is good, but much of the North San Pedro plan still screams "car traffic first."

“It’s very auto-oriented right now but that doesn’t mean people don’t walk on it, take transit on it, and occasionally bike on it--but conditions for those uses are... not that great,” noted a planner in a rather massive understatement.

South San Francisco will rebuild a one-mile segment of El Camino Real this Spring with wider sidewalks, safer crosswalks, curb extensions, pedestrian refuges, bike lanes, and new street trees planted in both the medians and sidewalks. However, the bike lanes won't be continuous--to preserve curbside parking, in places they will disappear. And some intersections will remain dangerous to cross.

More traffic going into more lanes for hundreds of millions of dollars rather than investing in potential transit solutions is, sadly, still business as usual in San Mateo County.